


In the Holding Tank I Built for Myself

by sciencebutch



Category: Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio), Doctor Who: Eighth Doctor Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: Dr Nyarlathotep, Eldritch Time Lords (Doctor Who), F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gen, also because i cant resist, but i wrote this in discord last night and i sorta liked it so now im posting it, can be read as romantic or platonic, its sorta a wing fic also
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:54:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26245999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sciencebutch/pseuds/sciencebutch
Summary: A single strand of human DNA taken and stretched from a single cell is over two meters long, it is just expertly folded to fit inside a nucleus. Much the same, a Time Lord’s body spans miles across dimensions, it is just packed tight and squirreled away inside one humanoid body.Until it isn’t.
Relationships: Eighth Doctor & Charley Pollard, Eighth Doctor/Charley Pollard
Comments: 5
Kudos: 45





	In the Holding Tank I Built for Myself

**Author's Note:**

> was in the mood for "doctor becomes horrifying creature" content last night thanks
> 
> (bet you can guess where the title comes from.)  
> (its a lyric from the mountain goats song 1 john 4:16)

A single strand of human DNA taken and stretched from a single cell is over two meters long, it is just expertly folded to fit inside a nucleus. Much the same, a Time Lord’s body spans miles across dimensions, it is just packed tight and squirreled away inside one humanoid body. 

Until it isn’t. 

The Doctor knows he’s terrifying and vast and ungainly. Having been shot point-blank by a dimensional inhibitor will do that to you, snip the string-theory threads cradling the parts of you held in higher dimensions so that they crash down, down, down, down into the visible spectrum and space and time. 

He’d run and hid in his room before the inhibitor fully took hold, his seven shadows trailing and sniggering after him like Peter Pan’s. He ran and hid because he didn’t want to show Charley that yes, he really is a monster, as much as he tries to convince her - and him, really, maybe he’s just trying to convince himself - otherwise. 

The tendrils of his hair morph and amass into livid tentacles above his head that whip about, fuming because they aren’t neatly tucked away. Arms sprout from his arms sprout from his arms sprout from his arms, like infinite reflections in two parallel mirrors. The insectoid limbs his race once had, evolved to be concealed permanently in the past, are thrust back into the future and there are eyes, like a fruit fly’s eyes, popping up in pockmarks on his skin and his lips snap like mandibles and he can feel the three pairs of antennae grow from his neck. 

He is terrifying, he is vast, he is ungainly, and he can take over worlds like this in the blink of an eye. But he is hiding in a corner, secluding himself away in a thick blanket of darkness that offers no respite, as he can see as if it were day with his many eyes. The lights are not on.

Until they are.

“Doctor?” Charley asks, and she can’t see him because he’s behind his bed and because his leathery wings are wrapped round him like a cocoon. “Doctor, are you quite alright? I saw you get hit with that...well, whatever it was. Are you hurt?”

“No,” he snaps, and it’s all eight of his voices speaking in tandem. He can see his seventh self’s eyes looking critically at him from his 20th palm. “‘M fine.” 

It is difficult to talk with ten tongues, all of different shapes. One flicks out to smell the air, to smell the time there. 

“Then why are you hiding in a corner?” Charley says, and he senses her coming around the bed--

“No!” he cries out laboriously, “No, don’t  _ look _ at me! You can’t!” his dark veiny wings fold further around, as if trying to constrict him out of reality itself. 

“Whyever not? Doctor, I can handle the sight of blood - I’m not a little girl, and God knows I’ve seen my fair share of it.”

But could she handle seeing his blood, flowing gold through the paper of his skin like ichor, like streams of lava glowing through cracks in the earth? The eyes of his fifth body peer at him gently from his forearm - the original one. 

“Just, just,” he breathes, and he can feel one of his many legs segment and harden with chitin. “Wait until it wears off.” 

“Until  _ what _ wears off? Doctor, you’re scaring me.” 

He is, he can smell it on her, all the pheromones. He wonders how much they’ll intensify and overwhelm when she sees him in all his unfathomable wings and claws and feathers. 

A TARDIS is meant to be flown with eight people, they say. In actuality, it’s meant to be flown with eight pairs of  _ hands _ . Usually they appear to be suspended in space, disconnected from any limbs, when they do appear. The arms expertly fold dimensions around them, like origami, so the hand can reach nearly anything, anywhere. The Doctor’s are atrophied and spindly from disuse, because he doesn’t use them, and they all burgeon from the small of his back, hunched and malformed, thin and creeping like spider legs. 

“Shouldn’t be more than an hour,” the Doctor explains without explaining. He can metabolize things much faster like this, for his hearts double and triple atop each other until they push against his thousands of ribs. You can see them pulse, pump the blood of time, of  _ gods _ through him, and he wishes - not for the first time - that the Time Lords had not been so greedy and arrogant that they injected time into their veins and grew and made themselves span entire worlds. 

He was forced to gaze upon the Untempered Schism when he was eight, and he saw all that ever was and all that ever could be, and so he became all he ever was and all he ever could be. 

“An hour?” a frustrated groan, “Doctor! You’ll bleed out by then, especially if it’s so bad you don’t even want me to look at you.” Charley seems to make up her mind, then, and she walks round the bed, saying, “That’s it, I’m coming over.”

“No!” the Doctor shouts, but it’s too late. 

There’s a moment of tense silence where he doesn’t dare  _ breathe _ , doesn’t allow the gills slit into his pectorals to flutter. 

“Oh,  _ Doctor _ ,” Charley gasps, finally, and he flinches as if he’d been struck. 

“Told you,” he breathes, feeling horrible, “Told you you shouldn’t look.” 

“What happened, Doctor? I thought it was just--” just what? A bullet? Dart? Laser? Energy blast? He’d prefer any of those things to  _ this _ . “Well, I don’t know. Not anything that could do this.” 

“Dimensional inhibitor,” he rasps, his throat so tight with the eight larynxes crammed in, “Takes all parts of me out of higher dimensions.” 

“What--”

“This is what a Time Lord’s body really looks like, Charley, behind the human facade.”

He expects her to be repulsed, to be repelled, to demand him to drop her off somewhere and never speak to her again, and he doesn’t think he’ll be able to handle that, that  _ rejection _ , that abandonment. That loss of love. 

“Oh, I see,” Charley says simply, “Well, why didn’t you just  _ tell  _ me that, instead of making me worry?” 

The Doctor is so shocked that it seeps the strength from his wings, and they slouch to the floor. “What?” his many eyes in all their motley hues snap up to her, a cacophony of scleras and pupils and irises. 

“I thought you were  _ dying _ , or that, oh - I don’t know, you’d been disemboweled, or something.” The Doctor watches, every part of him pulled taut, as Charley slowly reaches out a hand to stroke the arm covered in a horrifying mass of scales and feathers and fur. “I will admit, it was something of a surprise, but…”

“Don’t you mind?” 

Charley smiles, “Oh come now, Doctor, of course I don’t. You’ve shown me so many extraordinary things, it comes to reason that you’d be quite extraordinary yourself.”

Something like a chuckle emerges weakly from somewhere, “ _ Extraordinary _ ,” he repeats sardonically, folding two of his legs up to his chest and crossing two of his arms to lean one of his chins on. One of his wings, feathered in a dark oily pitch, flutters of its own accord, and accidentally brushes Charley’s cheek. 

He hasn’t preened the feathers in centuries, so they’re a tattered disorganized mess, every dislodged rachis probing and poking uncomfortably at his flesh like mites crawling under his skin.

“Yes, Doctor, quite extraordinary.” Charley absentmindedly pulls one straight, and he shivers. Encouraged, she continues.

“I would have agreed with you,” he mutters, “A few bodies ago.” Back when his humanoid form was volatile and he was unapologetically alien and Gallifrey’s fog still impounded his brain. Back before Barbara and Ian, or even before  _ him, _ when he was his last incarnation, when he would manipulate people into suicides and genocides and demolish planets on a whim.

But he isn’t like that now, he  _ isn’t _ . He isn’t and he won’t be. He’s gentle and passionate and emotional and human, and he won’t scare Charley away like he scared Ace away. 

“Does it hurt?” Charley asks after he’s fallen back to silence. 

It feels freeing, and he hates to admit it, because he doesn’t want it to be. It’s like taking a breath through your nose after you’ve been congested, like taking off too-tight clothes. “No,” he responds. 

“Well, that’s all good, then.” And then Charley scoots to sit next to him,  _ lean _ against him, like she would normally do when they’re reading together in the library. He is worried to rest an arm around her shoulders, for his fingers knuckle and curl into talons, and he does not want to accidentally scratch her. 

Still, he wants to be close; this body has always been tactile. He settles for wrapping a fathom-long prehensile tail about her abdomen, and drapes a single oil-slick wing around her back like a curtain. She leans into the soft down to be found there. 

“You really don’t mind?” he asks tentatively, afraid of any answer she might give. Posing the question feels rather like jumping off a cliff.

“‘Of course I don’t, why would I?” 

Half of him snorts derisively, the other gives a self-loathing chuckle, and it emerges from his clacking mouth like a record scratch. “Humans tend to dislike that which they don’t understand.”

She sits up to look at him, and she’s frowning. “Oh come now, Doctor,” Charley says, “I hardly ever understand half the things you say, but that doesn’t mean I love you any less.” 

The parts of him with the capability smile, bearing fangs like knives and baleen and tough thick molars. “Come to think of it, I don’t understand half the things I say either.”

“Well, there you go then.” Charley says it with a finality he feels he doesn’t deserve.

With a soft grin he nuzzles her hair, planting a gentle barely-there kiss to her crown. 

Eventually he speaks again, after Charley had been nestled against him for twenty minutes exactly, “Feels nice,” he admits, and she hums groggily. She must’ve dozed off. “...Freeing.” 

“Yeah?” she yawns, “Mm, why don’t you do it more often? You’re very cozy.” 

The Doctor doesn’t say it’s because he’s shifted all the points away, dulled the pins and needles that would poke her. “Would you want me to?” 

“It’s more about you than me, Doctor.”

“Perhaps I will, then,” and he feels even more free than he had before. Not just free - liberated.

...

He’s asleep when the inhibitor wears off, all settled and snuggled up with Charley, and when he wakes to see her in the nest of his wings, he doesn’t tuck everything away again. Not now. 

_ Maybe later, _ he thinks, and relaxes back into slumber. 

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on [tumblr!](%E2%80%9Ceightdoctor.tumblr.com%E2%80%9D)


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